Sunday, April 15, 2012

The "Father of History," Emerging Markets, and More: This Week in the Book Pages

According to Stanley Payne, the history of the Spanish Civil War has benefited from the late twentieth century shift from studies that "privileged the role of heroes" to those that "placed the emphasis on the victim." In The Wall Street Journal, Payne reviews Paul Preston's The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth Century Spain(Norton), which he explains "has the merit of looking in detail at the atrocities committed by both sides" of the Spanish Civil War, but ultimately reproduces "some of the oldest stereotypes" of the event. The complete review is here.

Also, in TheWall Street Journal, in "How the World Gets Ahead," Matthew Rees reviews three books that address in different ways "the near-miraculous rise of emerging markets and the explosive growth of hitherto stagnant or failing economies" in the post-1970s world economy: Ruchi Sharma's Breakout Nations(Norton), Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran's Need, Speed, and Greed (Harper), and Philip E. Auerswald's The Coming Prosperity (Oxford).

Two reviews this week take up books that attempt historical recoveries of "founders" of different sorts. In The New Republic: The Book Peter Green reviews Jennifer Roberts’s Herodotus: A Very Short Introduction(Oxford University Press). Green writes:

Built on a vast but unobtrusive bedrock of fine scholarship, its research up-to-date, its judgments and interpretations well-balanced, its obvious affection for its subject never getting in the way of a necessary correction, its tone as amused, ironic, and humane as Herodotus’s own, this little volume is as near-perfect an introduction to the Father of History as one could hope for: the general readers for whom it is intended to count themselves lucky, and— expert credite— scholars may learn a thing or to from it as well.

According to Green, Robert's accomplishes a kind of historical recovery of a Herodutus who "suddenly...look[s] staggeringly modern" to ancient historians. Read the complete review, here.

In the Wall Street Journal, Alan Pell Crawford reviews David Barton's attempt at another kind of historical recovery in The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson(Thomas Nelson). Barton, one of Time Magazine's 25 "most influential evangelicals" attempts to "set the record straight on the Hemings matter" by repeating well-trod arguments about Sally Hemings's uncertain paternity, and in the end, produces a history that, as Crawford writes, "does no service to his reputation-- or to the American past." The complete review is here.

On another American president, The New York Times has a review of Richard Aldous's Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship(Norton), a book that sheds light on the "many tensions and even conflicts" behind their "mutual applause" and challenges "the heroic" narrative "in which two great leaders continued the struggle for freedom waged for generations past by 'the English-speaking peoples.'"

The historical experience of Latino Catholics was, in some
ways, the reverse of what later European immigrants experienced. The
nineteenth-century Irish and German immigrants left their homelands to come to
America, but according to Timothy Matovina “the first large group of Hispanic
Catholics became part of the nation during that same era without ever leaving
home, as they were incorporated into its boundaries during U.S. territorial
expansion into Florida and then westward.” Additionally, when restrictive
immigration laws in the 1920s closed the doors to Europe, the Mexican
Revolution initiated the first large-scale immigration of Latinos across the
border into the United States. In the post-World War II era, “waves of Hispanic
immigrants have comprised an increasingly significant portion of what was
purportedly an established, Americanized, post-immigrant church.

And some food for thought: The New York Times has Dwight Garner's review of Tyler Cowen, An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies(Dutton). As Garner explains: “Mr. Cowen is a right-leaning economist and a contrarian foodie. He takes aim at a fat target: food-world pretentiousness. He attempts to skewer the slow-food, eat-local and eat-fresh movements; to him, they’re expensive and snobbish. He praises modern agribusiness. He admires the genetically modified animals and produce that opponents call Frankenfood." But, “in relating all this," Garner concludes, "Mr. Cowen comes perilously close to suggesting that we shouldn’t care about where and how our food is grown.”